The Southern Environmental Law Center disagrees strong with Duke Energy’s claim to be finished with the Dan River cleanup after removing 3,000 tons of coal ash and sediment following the February spill of up to 39,000 tons.

“Duke Energy has not completed cleanup of their coal ash spill into the Dan River, they have just stopped,” the organization said last week. It said Duke has “not accounted for 94% of the coal ash waste spilled into the Dan River.”

Myles Bartos, one of two on-scene coordinators for the U.S. EPA agrees. Charlotte-based Duke has cleaned the large coal ash deposits found on the banks and in the river sediment according to guidelines the EPA approved after the spill, he said late last week.

While a vast amount of ash remains in the river sediment, Bartos said there are no signs that it is lying anywhere in concentrations that are large enough to warrant attempting to remove it.

He said the remaining ash appears to have been spread in a thin layer along the 70 miles of the river from the site of the spill, Duke’s closed Dan River Steam Station in Eden, to the Kerr Lake Reservoir.

And Bartos noted the issue is not the volume of the ash itself, but the concentration of the toxic metals contained in the ash. Abnormally high toxic metal readings disappeared from the river water within a couple of weeks of the spill, and hundreds of water samples tested since then have shown no rise in those metal levels.

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